A Perfect Waiter (23 page)

It was a dream, and Erneste managed to sustain it until they boarded the little steamer that took them back to Giessbach late that afternoon—for far longer, at any rate, than he had hoped at the start of their brief day's journey into the past. During the return trip across the lake, however, anguish overcame him with a ferocity that undid all his recent experiences: walking together, shopping at Schaufelberger's, regaling themselves in the Café Schuh with Black Forest gâteau and coffee followed by a shandy apiece. Now, even Jakob seemed to have ceased to exist. He was already as remote as if he had been ousted from Erneste's world at a stroke, even though, when Erneste opened his eyes, Jakob was still sitting there beside him, engrossed in thoughts to which he no longer had access. He couldn't help fearing that those thoughts had ceased to be of him and were now of Klinger. For all that, however, Jakob had accomplished what he'd probably had in mind when asking Erneste to keep him company: a kind of reconciliation. To all appearances, therefore, it was as if Erneste hadn't taken his infidelity amiss—as if he accepted it as a part of his character and an indispensable step into the future.

He would have liked to ask Jakob a simple question, but he didn't. It was far too late for simple questions like those that had haunted him for days. The question he dared not ask, because he dreaded a rebuff, was whether he could come with him to America. He, Erneste, at Jakob's side in America … There must surely be a place for him in Klinger's household, or, if not there, with one of the many other German families that were emigrating to America and had jobs to offer.

But he didn't ask, neither on the trip back to Giessbach, nor during the night that followed, nor during the very last night they spent together, when neither of them refused the other. Even as they were responding to each other with every fiber of their bodies, the words refused to be uttered by Erneste's inner voice, which kept urging him to ask Jakob if he could accompany him as the valet of a valet or secretary or lover, or whatever function or disguise Jakob was adopting in order to go away with Klinger. The opportunity didn't arise. He couldn't speak of it, and the simple, gnawing question lodged deep inside him, where it found the noxious sustenance on which it would feed for decades to come.

At last, when Jakob had stowed everything away in his suitcase, he went and stood at the washbasin with his back to Erneste. He bent and sluiced his face under the faucet, moistened his hair and sleeked it down. Taking the washcloth, he soaped it and swabbed his neck, shoulders, armpits and chest. He soaped it again and swabbed his stomach and back, insofar as he could reach it. Then he
slid his underpants down over his thighs with his left hand, spreading his thighs a little to prevent them from slipping off, and used his right hand to soap his buttocks and genitals. Having wrung out the washcloth, he proceeded to wipe off the soap and dried himself carefully on a towel. He was smiling when he turned to face Erneste once more and started to get dressed.

If Erneste could have suited himself he would have stolen away after that, but he couldn't; he had to fulfill his promise to help Jakob with the baggage. Together, they conveyed the wardrobe trunk and the other pieces of luggage from the four rooms occupied by the Klingers and Frau Moser down to the lobby and from there, with the aid of a baggage cart, to the cable car.

The steamer left at eleven. While Klinger, his wife and two children looked back at the landing stage as if trying to preserve a vivid recollection of the place in Europe where they had spent a considerable period, possibly for the last time, Jakob gazed ahead at the mirror-smooth surface of the lake. Erneste was thus spared a final look into his eyes.

Muffled up in his heavy overcoat, he stared out across the lake. Just in front of him two swans were slowly swimming in circles, half submerging and surfacing in turn, and when they shook their heads the spray flew from their white necks, which looked as if they were covered with
fur, not feathers. It was cold and windy, but the snow had stopped.

He had never paused there before in all the years he had lived and worked in this town and walked along the lakeshore almost daily, but now he came to a halt and looked out across the water. He sat down on a bench and stared straight ahead, but the far shore could not be seen, having vanished into the mist. In the middle of the lake, still just visible, was a little white steamer with white smoke rising from its black smokestack.

How many hours, days and weeks had gone by since then? He didn't bother to count. It didn't matter how much time had passed since that Sunday in October when Julius Klinger had called on him to tell him about Jakob, the lover of three men and of many more whose names they fortunately hadn't known—Jakob, who had died far away in a place to which Erneste would never travel and from which his last news of Jakob had come: cries for help that had swiftly faded because they were voiceless and incorporeal, just lines of writing on flimsy paper, a reverberation from the soundbox of some indeterminate instrument.

Klinger had eventually risen and stepped forward as if intending to kiss him, but Erneste had evaded him. No, no, it would have been too ridiculous to be kissed by that old man. It wasn't hostility, just old age, that made him recoil. He felt no hostility, for what had happened had happened long ago, at a time on which the curtain had now descended. At this moment it was as invisible
as the far shore, as unfamiliar as the instrument from which Jakob's voice was issuing like a whisper. He had to be prepared for the mist soon to clear, disclosing the view once more, but more time would have passed by then.

Alain Claude Sulzer was born in Basel in 1953. His first novel was published in 1983 and he has since written four further books, including numerous short stories, and the novels
Annas Maske
(2001) and
Privatstunden
(2007).
A Perfect Waiter (Ein Perfekter Kellner
, 2004) is his first novel to be translated into English. He lives in Alsace.

John Brownjohn is one of Britain's leading translators from German and has won critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, notably for
“My Wounded Heart”: The Life
of
Lilli Jahn 1900—44
by Martin Doerry. Among his awards are the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for Thomas Brussig's
Heroes Like Us
and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for Marcel Beyer's
The Karnau Tapes
.

First published in Great Britain 2008

This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © Edition Epoca AG Zurich 2004
Copyright © 2004 by Alain Claude Sulzer
English translation copyright © 2008 by John Brownjohn

The moral right of the author and translator has been asserted

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eISBN: 978-1-4088-5636-9

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